"When Rudy Gobert was infected on Wednesday night, I think the realization in the basketball community hit home and was very much felt on Thursday morning," Gavitt said. "The student-athletes, from what we were hearing and sensing, felt very vulnerable. Here was someone they would all like to be one day, playing in the NBA, who got infected and was quarantined with his teammates. His opponents were quarantined.

"That was really, in my opinion, a seminal moment in everybody's mindset about how impractical and possibly not responsible it would be at that point to go forward with trying to hold these national championships."

According to NCAA President Mark Emmert, the organization expected the tournament to go on as planned, with banning fans from attending games being the only precautions necessary to combat the viral outbreak.

"We [were] completely convinced at 4 p.m. on Wednesday that we could conduct the championships without fans by controlling the sites effectively," Emmert said. "We thought we could control the perimeters and control the environment, and, as best as possible, travel, because it's mostly charter travel and buses one way or another. We felt really confident about it. We were feeling really, really good."

Hours later, the Jazz’s game against the Oklahoma City Thunder was suddenly stopped, Gobert’s diagnosis came back and the entire sports world shifted. Upon further evaluation, Emmert and the NCAA realized the scale of the pandemic, the fact they were not enough test kits to evaluate every student-athlete who would participate in the event and decided the proper course of action was to cancel the tournament for the first time since it began in the 1939 season.

"You're talking about a very limited resource -- these test kits," Emmert said. "I'm not a public health official, but you've got this very scarce resource right now. Whether it should be scarce or not is another question, but it is scarce. And here you're talking about otherwise really, really healthy people, and should you take that scarce resource and test otherwise [healthy] 19-year-olds? Some of the public health officials were saying that's not a best use of this resource, and we were not going to have access to what we thought we needed. That was just one data point."

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